The Moscow Criterion
Sir Humphrey: "But it's not fair! With Trident we could obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe!"
Sir Humphrey: "Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that, although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would."
Jim Hacker: "We don't want to obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe."
Sir Humphrey: "But it's a deterrent!"
Jim Hacker: "It's a bluff, I probably wouldn't use it."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes, but they don't know that you probably wouldn't."
Jim Hacker: "They probably do."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn't but they can't certainly know!"
Jim Hacker: "They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn't."
Cold War and present nuclear strategy, with the ideas underpinning it. The title, despite sounding rather like a Robert Ludlum novel, was a part of British nuclear thinking and the reason for the Chevaline upgrade to Polaris. It basically meant: retain the ability to destroy Moscow.
Concepts
First-strike Capability
The ability of one nuclear power to destroy another and only receive an "acceptable" level of losses from nuclear attack yourself. Basically requires the ability to a) eliminate command and control functions or b) eliminate the bulk of nuclear forces in a surprise attack.
The US possessed it briefly in the late 1950s before the Soviet ICBM force was fully capable. The US feared the Soviets could do this at the beginning of the 1980s and the Soviets also feared that US Gryphon/Pershing II missiles could do the same.
Both the US and Russia have their ICBM forces ready to go in 15 minutes (fuelled, but not targeted) and can detect an attack 25 minutes before first impacts, so neither have it.
Second-strike capability
The ability for nuclear forces to survive a full-scale nuclear attack and be able to launch a devastating counter-attack. In practice, involves SSBNs and back-up command centres.
Time
It takes about half an hour for a missile to go from the US to Russia. It's only 10 minutes from Western Europe to Russia.
Counterforce/Countervalue
These two terms refer to what you're targeting, with "counterforce" targeting your enemy's nuclear weapons (airbases, missile silos, etc.) and "countervalue" targeting what your enemy would, well, value (cities, industrial centers, national capitals, etc.) This can affect the kind of nuclear attack you might make - if you're doing a counterforce strategy, your warheads will be designed to detonate on the ground in order to maximize the chance of damaging hardened military installations. For a countervalue strategy, your warheads would detonate in the air in order to spread catastrophe over the widest possible area (no need to detonate on the ground since countervalue targets like cities and industrial centers will not withstand even a less powerful airburst).
National Strategies
Keep The Toilet Handy- The United States
The main worry for the United States was the survivability of their nuclear forces. Pentagon planners feared a Soviet first strike would cripple their nuclear capability and leave them defenceless. It was important to make sure that forces got off the ground as soon as possible.
The first example of this, before the ICBM and boomer fleet got fully operational was the "aerial patrol" approach. Some American bombers would be in the sky 24 hours a day, in case of a sudden attack. They were under a system called "positive control"- bombers could not proceed beyond a certain point without a verified order from the President.
This had problems- namely nuclear bombs flying around. After a couple of "Broken Arrow" incidents, with resultant radioactive mess, this idea was abandoned.
The Strategic Air Command then moved onto a strip alert system. It was initially thought that there would be an hour's warning before Mnogo Nukes started landing on many targets, but as the Soviet ICBM force got more capable, this was dropped to 15 minutes.
As a result of this, Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber crews (mostly in B-52s) would be kept on constant alert, ready at a moment's notice to rush to their aircraft and take off.
A Union Jack On Top Of It- The United Kingdom
British nuclear strategy was largely to coordinate with the US, but it had several differences informed by two major considerations. The first was the aforementioned lack of time: with possibly less than five minutes elapsing between recieving comfirmation of a launch and the first mushroom clouds, it was accepted fact that the government would be wiped out before it could give launch orders. RN boomers therefore operated on a limited fail-deadly system: if unable to detect any of several signs of life from the UK, including Admiralty broadcasts and the Today program, the Captain was to open a set of sealed orders called the Letters of Last Resort and carry them out. This could mean anything from a full retaliatory strike to taking orders from Australia, depending on what the current Prime Minister decided when he wrote them (the letters are destroyed unread when the PM changes). Even today RN Trident missiles don't need unlock codes transmitted from higher command to arm them.
The second factor was that the British, not being the United States, couldn't afford as much in the way of armaments, including the nuclear kind, being heavily in debt (primarily to the US) after World War Two. Unlike the US, their strategy wasn't one of mutually assured destruction; it just wasn't a viable option. Rather, just in case, they wanted enough in the way of nuclear weapons to make it not worthwhile for the Soviets. Also, they were worried that if the Soviets, in event of a nuclear exchange, were to only target the UK and the rest of Western Europe, the United States would not use its own nuclear weapons, preferring to sacrifice those areas instead of suffering through a Soviet strike itself. The British nuclear deterrent was intended to give those evil Russkies a little something to contemplate.
And, yes, one of the major points of this policy was being able to guarantee the destruction of Moscow. There was a problem, though; with four Resolution-class submarines (not counting air-launched weapons deployed by bomber squadrons) the UK had a total of 64 Polaris missiles and 192 warheads. Bear in mind, though, that those warheads aren't in MIRVs; the Polaris only had MRVs. They'd be evenly distributed around the aim point and do more damage, but they couldn't be independently targeted. And that was in a best-case scenario; perhaps one or more of the boats might be destroyed or something similar, almost certainly some of the missiles wouldn't work as advertised, etc.
Against the Brits, even the very limited ABM system around Moscow that the Soviets were allowed under the ABM Treaty (100 interceptors) was worrisome. The Soviets might have gotten the wrong idea. So, the British designed an upgrade to their Polaris missiles; the Polaris A3TK, which was fitted with the Chevaline system. It reduced the number of warheads from three to two as well as cutting range substantially, but on the plus side it vastly improved the chances of those warheads to make it past Soviet defenses.
Basically, the SLBMs would toss off a bunch of countermeasures and "penetration aids," and the Soviets would see a lot of fake, although realistic-looking, contacts with their various sensors, which would more than make up for the reduced number of warheads. The destruction of Moscow could be assured so that peace and harmony might prevail.
Due to the limited range of Polaris and the fact that Moscow is considerably further from a coast than London or Washington, UK boomers bombers would be up near the Barents Sea or in the Eastern Mediterranean.
- This explains why HMS Ranger is all the way
Oop Northup north when it's grabbed in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Compare with Ultimate Defence of the Realm.
Bastion Areas- The USSR
The Soviet Union's targeting strategy was "counter-value", namely focusing on economic targets and cities. Contrary to many perceptions at the time, they showed no interest in launching a first strike- they focused on surviving a first one (or disrupting preparations for a strike on them) with enough forces to launch a devastating counter-strike.
Boomers
The Soviet boomers had two differences to NATO ones. One, they were noisier. Two, after the arrival of the "Delta" class, they had considerably more range. This meant that some Soviet submarines could, if need be, launch their missiles from the dock and hit the US.
Since there was no point running the gauntlet of NATO naval forces, later Soviet boomers would stay in bastion areas near the Soviet coast. There they would be protected by other subs and surface ships.
There was still a place for the older stuff though, such as the "Yankee" class. Due to the shorter time of missile flight, they would have been used to destroy time-sensitive targets in a nuclear war (namely bomber bases, boomers in port, etc.)- if they'd been able to launch.
The "Typhoon" class can spend a year submerged - though in practice Soviet SSBNs in general stayed out for far shorter periods of time, due to political concerns about crew reliability - the Soviets might well have used to launch a very late counter-strike.
ICBM forces and a holiday in Cuba
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 resulted from Soviet missile deployments in Cuba allowing them guaranteed strike capability against the continental United States.
Their forces began to improve and they would harden their ICBM silos in the late 1970s/early 1980s, to ensure a second-strike capability.
The Dead Hand
Seriously worried (more than the West realised at the time) about the US launching a surprise decapitation attack in the early 1980s, with Trident SLBMs, Gryphon cruise missiles and Pershing II MRBMs, the USSR developed a system called "Perimetr". This semi-automatic system, which is believed to still be in operation, would delegate control of Russian missile forces to a senior commander if contact was lost with Moscow.
The LORD is our shepherd, says the psalm...but just in case, we better get a bomb!
Israel has never admitted to being a nuclear power, and has never admitted this since the late 1960s. But we all know. It's quite a respectable one; at this point, they have something like several hundred deliverable nuclear devices, which are by all accounts quite sophisticated. To put them on target, they have their air force, a number of IRBMs (and they may have some kind of ICBM capability, too...) and even some submarine-launched cruise missiles. Israel's nuclear strategy is called the "Samson Option;" in case Israel is totally doomed and about to be wiped out/driven into the sea/whatever, probably at the hands of their Arab neighbors, it can assure their destruction as well. Anyway, they developed their nuclear program with a good deal of French aid (in fact, it went both ways...there's a good deal of evidence that the Israelis helped the French come up with the bomb, too...) and by 1967-1968, had several warheads. They maintain a policy of ambiguity to this day, neither officially confirming nor denying their ownership of nuclear weapons, although the existence of their nuclear arsenal and the delivery systems and everything is commonly accepted.
Some British credible newspaper reports in 2006-07 indicated that around 1960, the United Kingdom supplied some essential hardware to Israel's nuclear programme (e.g. tons of heavy water). The export decisions appear to have been made by senior civil servants without consulting the relevant cabinet ministers. (Reminds me of Yes, Minister.)
The nuclear weapons came in handy in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War; the Israelis armed a number of F-4s with nuclear bombs and kept them ready on the ground. The US wanted to keep the Israelis from having to use their nuclear weapons at all costs, so they bailed out their ally in Operation Nickel Grass, a massive airlift to resupply the Israeli armed forces, which had gone through a good deal of their deadly paraphernalia in the fighting.
Today, they almost certainly have boosted-fission devices and probably even a few thermonuclear warheads, too. They developed nuclear artillery shells and may have even devised suitcase nukes.
- This is part of the explanation for Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears - the Israelis launched one of their nuclear
F-4sA-4s by mistake, it got shot down without bombing, and after a long series of trade-offs and negotiations the nuke ends up in the hands of terrorists.
Le Champignon Atomique - France
Yes, France is a nuclear power as well. They're one of the five declared nuclear weapons states under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in fact. It came down to a combination of factors, including a perceived need to be able to independently deter the Soviets as well as national pride. The French were rather afraid of the Soviets overrunning Western Europe, for obvious reasons. Like the UK, there was no way that the French could possibly build enough warheads and delivery systems to be able to totally wipe out the USSR, but they could gouge it pretty badly. Charles de Gaulle said it pretty well, "Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill 80 million Russians. I truly believe that one does not light-heartedly attack people who are able to kill 80 million Russians, even if one can kill 800 million French, that is if there were 800 million French." It wouldn't be worth it, for the Soviets, to totally wipe out France or whatever; instead, they'd leave France be.
Initially the French nuclear deterrent was based on nuclear gravity bombs, carried to targets in the USSR by Dassault Mirage IV bombers. At first they were intended to go in at high speed and high altitude, but that soon was no longer viable; eventually they were modified for low-altitude penetration and equipped with stand-off weapons. The French also developed a variety of tactical nuclear weapons, including tactical nuclear gravity bombs and some nuclear artillery systems, and were one of the countries to develop their own version of an "enhanced radiation warhead," otherwise known as the "neutron bomb." The nuclear artillery systems were intended to "warn" the Soviets not to go any farther. Today, though, the French strategic nuclear deterrent is (mostly- the Mirage 2000N has an air-launched missile capability) based on submarines: they commissioned their first boomers in 1971, and have been modernizing and replacing their force since then. They're a respectable nuclear power today, although of course they don't have the sheer terrifying world-ending power of the US or Russian strategic nuclear forces at their disposal.
Early in 2008, it was announced that France was going to cut its nuclear arsenal to 1/2 of what it is authorized, to 200 warheads. France doesn't really have enemies in the Middle East (the only countries that might have a reason to do something), and none of them have the means to reach France by missile anyway, and by now neither the U.S. nor Russia really want anything from France (which are the only countries left that have military forces strong enough to invade it.)
Of course, the Iranians might roll out a nuclear missile capable of hitting France within the next five to ten years; you never know. So staying en garde still makes some sense, at least.
Compare with The Ultimate Resistance.